further investigation, there are two essentials for a wise decision.
First, a study of the records of the promoters, and second, a personal
examination of the property. If these can be thoroughly made, and the
results are satisfactory after a suitable period of mental incubation,
if the prospects will stand the candle test for fertility, you may put
some money on the chance of a good hatch; remembering, too, that many a
good hatch afterward comes to grief with the pip.

Some promotions are conceived in iniquity, some in drunkenness and folly
and some are abortive from incapacity. Your legitimate and well-born,
well-brought-up promotion, fathered by ability and mothered by honesty,
it is your problem to recognize, if that is what you are looking for,
and to avoid the low-born trickster or incapable. No one can tell you
how to do this any more than he can tell you an easy way to graft
hickories.

The northern nut grower is not yet bothered with northern nut
promotions. At most he is called on to discount the statements of
sellers of trees, and that a little, not too expensive, experience will
teach him. The West is apparently too busy selling fruit and fruit lands
to lay out nuts to trap eastern nibblers. But the allurements of pecan
growing in the South are spread before us with our bread and butter and
morning coffee. The orange and pomelo properties have been banished from
the stage, or made to play second fiddle, and now we see in the
limelight the pecan plantation, with a vista of provision for old age
and insurance for our children. And there shall be no work nor care nor
trouble about it at all. Only something down and about ten dollars a
month for ninety-six months. And the intercropping is to more than pay
for that. It is indeed an enticing presentation.

Although we have as yet no northern nut promotions we may expect the
time when the sandy barrens of the shore and the boulder pastures of the
rock ribbed hills will be cut up into five acre plots and promoted as
the natural home of the chestnut and the hickory, holding potential
fortunes for their developers. I hope it will be so for it will
postulate a foundation in fact. But the chestnut blight and the
unresponsiveness of the hickory to propagation as yet hold up these
future camp followers of the northern nut growing pioneers. So that for
the present there is only the sword of the southern pecan promoter to
parry.

It would be a work of supererogation a